With that I stood up with both of my fuck-off fingers flung high, and I walked out the door of another HR personnel’s office.
Then I was driving in my car when I started asking myself serious questions apropos Adeleine’s conversations with me: if I did change my career, what would it be? In fact, it was a friend who had gotten me into the telecom industry. I was always going the path of least resistance. But now, driving in my car, I thought: if I were to take matters into my own hands and be anything I want to be, what would I do? I felt pathetic that I couldn’t come up with an answer. I thought about it for a long time but nothing ever entered my head. Then one thing led to another and I got to thinking about my education.
I had never had much of an education. You know they say education is wasted on the young. Well to a certain extent I would say this was true for me, and I was feeling lousy that I hadn’t tried to do more with myself, education-wise. But suddenly there was something that jumped out at me from those days: an almost inane conversation I had had ages ago at Steinmetz high school on the northwest side of Chicago where I had been a student.
My high school experience at Steinmetz was generally unpleasant, and it didn’t offer much in the way of an education, but I trod on with it best I could. To give you an idea, the famous Las Vegas mobster, Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, had been a student at Steinmetz the generation before me. And he and his brother Michael were beaten in a Bensenville basement by mobsters, then killed and buried six feet under an Indiana cornfield only a few years after I graduated from Steinmetz. In fact, when I attended the school, there were still a bunch of little Tony Spilotro types running around its corridors. Some of these guys were my friends. I lifted weights with them. I slammed my fists into punching bags with them. I shot guns with them. I even terrorized other students with them. As to my studies, like I say, there wasn’t much to it. However, I can vividly recall one day sitting around the lunch table with my friends when a fellow classmate, Terrence MacDonald, told us about his dad. His dad was a detective. He was a private eye. I didn’t think much about Terrance, who we nicknamed alternately ‘Big Mac’ and ‘Had A Farm.’ But Terrance said something about his dad that stuck in my head. He said: My dad likes the detective business because it gives him time to watch the horses and fish.
So after that interview, I was sitting in my car at a stoplight waiting for the light to turn green. Maybe I was humming that nursery rhyme, Old MacDonald, or maybe I was singing the Big Mac jingle. But that conversation with Terrance from so long ago just drifted up from wherever I had kept it—drifted right into plain view, and there it was. I don’t know why this sentence of Terrence’s stuck in my head, but it did. I honestly never forgot it. It was just something I carried with me. Why not become a detective? I thought. I like to watch the horses and fish. What’s more, there are worse jobs out there. Besides, I’m sure I’m capable of doing it. Then the light turned green, and I drove off to tell Adeleine.
¤
I don’t know what made me think I would be capable of being a private eye. I suppose I just imagined that anyone with half a brain could do it. But I was wrong about this. I never quite figured the business out. I was probably not meant to be a private eye. In fact, I was probably more suited to being a cog in a big organization. But because there was a war between me and HR personnel, I had officially given that up. I was going my own way. Starting fresh. I was going to self-determine who I was going to be from here on out. What do you want to do? I want to be a private eye.
When I proposed the detective idea to Adeleine as a way to regain my foothold in the economy, she outright laughed at me because she thought I was joking. When I insisted that I wasn’t joking, she grew serious, frowned a little, and said it was a bad idea. She didn’t think I had what it took to succeed in such a business. She knew that I was inclined to laziness, and so I was probably better working in a job with a boss. With a boss telling me what to do, I would be fine, but as a boss, my laziness would get the better of me. But if I didn’t want to go back into something like telecom, she thought my skills—‘Your skills’ is what she said—could be better applied in a career like teaching. What’s more, she said—and this she argued time and time again until I finally earned my detective license and hung my shingle, at which point she stopped arguing with me—what’s more, not only will you be ineffectual as a detective, and as your own boss, but as a result you will find it a dull and uninteresting career change.
In the end, Adeleine proved correct on every point. After hanging my shingle—and I hung it on my wife’s dime—I knew almost immediately that not only was I not suited for such a job, but that it really wasn’t a very interesting job. Perhaps it was just my disposition that made me think it wasn’t an interesting job. If I had been suited for the work in the first place, I might have felt differently. Indeed I might have found it a fascinating business. However, I did not find it fascinating. It was an albatross around my neck.
What’s worse, once I took the business on I didn’t know how to back out of it. I didn’t know how to cry uncle. I was in whole-hog as they say, and I was too stubborn to budge out.
Furthermore, I found that the secondary benefits of being a self-employed detective—the fishing, the horses, the shooting of the guns at the shooting range—were not distracting enough to keep me from worrying that I had made a terrible life choice and that my life, as a result, was being squandered. Going to the horses or fishing only enhanced the sense that I was making a terrible mistake and that wasted time and life was the only outcome I could expect from such foolishness. Yet rain, sleet, snow, or shine: off to the horses I went, or fishing, or shooting my guns at the shooting range with Cal.
When I did get some business and my wife was killed as a direct result of my work, I realized that becoming a detective had been the most fateful and devastating decision I had ever made, and I never got over the whimsical stupidity of my own thinking.
?
The hardest thing, I tell Cal.
We’re at the horses. Or we’re shooting. Or we’re in the car going hither and thither.
God damn it, he says, pounding on his horn.
You’re too aggressive a driver.
I can’t help it, Cal shouts back at me. These stupid drivers!
They’re not all stupid. It’s just that…
It’s just what?
Like I was saying before you interrupted me. The hardest thing about all this…
About what?
About my wife being dead.
Cal looks across the seat at me with a touch of fear in his eyes. A look that says: Oh shit, he’s going to start talking about his dead wife.
I have to talk about my dead wife to someone. Who can I go to if not you? I ask Cal.